World Reports

Cultivating change in Colombia

"If
there isn't green, there isn't life," says Luz Dary Ayala. Ayala is one
of the inhabitants of Ciudád Bolivar who is trying to revitalize this
impoverished neighborhood of Bogotá by planting seeds.

Sprawling
across the southern end of Colombia's capital, Ciudád Bolivar is home
to 1,300,000 people, encompassing over 300 smaller barrios.
The massive housing projects in the flats give way to brick dwellings
and then to squatters' shacks of wood and sheet metal as the city
spreads into the hills. Ciudád Bolivar is best known for its crime and
violence in a city where more than half the population is poor, and a
great number of children and elderly are malnourished. Its population
consists mainly of campesinos and indigenous Colombians in search of a new and better life. Fleeing war, US-funded
coca fumigation, economic hardship, guerrillas, and paramilitaries,
they bring little to this community named after Colombia's liberator -
sometimes no more than hope.

But in the summer of 2005, the Urban
Agriculture Pilot Project began working with the people of Ciudád
Bolivar, teaching them how to grow healthful food in their homes and
open spaces, and helping them to repair their fractured social
structure. The project, supported by the mayor's office, Bogotá Without Hunger, and the Network of Botanical Gardens of Colombia,
among others, has the goal of training 6,000 families in the basics of
urban agriculture using organic, water-conserving, environmentally
friendly, and sustainable methods. Through workshops in the production
of compost and bio-fertilizers, the use of medicinal plants, and
cooking what is cultivated in the household, citizens are taking steps
to reduce the hunger, malnutrition, and social maladies that plague
their barrio.

Surrounded by the greenery
of Bogotá's Botanical Garden, Carlos Romero, the project's agricultural
engineer, explains the program's phases. The first 10-month phase was
spent getting accustomed to how people and things operate in the barrio.
The second phase, just recently funded, will concern "people,
production, and promotion," Romero says, "to get more residents there
to accept this form of agriculture." Coming from the countryside, many
participants feel they must have large plots of land to produce food -
a mindset Romero and the other technicians are trying to change. They
are teaching the former campesinos to grow
medicinal plants and vegetables like tomatoes, cabbage, potatoes,
garlic, and cucumbers in minimal space. Old household items like
plastic soda bottles, cooking pots, tires, discarded bathtubs, and
plastic bags are used to germinate seeds and grow plants. Their methods
are “aprender-haciendo” (learning by doing).

"We are not producing engineers or technicians," Romero says. "These are simple people."

"The
armed conflict is feeding the immigration to this area," says the
project's agronomist Uriel Leon, as snapshots of Ciudád Bolivar's lives
flash behind him through the open truck window. The women going to the
market and children selling newspapers and candy are his students. The
classrooms are 27 "self-forming nuclei," the centers where the locals
are taught the theoretical and practical aspects of urban agriculture.
Nuclei are located in schools, community centers, and vacant lots, and
contain the 70 actual outdoor gardens and greenhouses where the
participants get their "hands-on" experience. These "demonstrative
units," as they are called, are established where they can be easily
reached, so the gardeners can learn the techniques of daily
maintenance. "Satellite nuclei" will be spawned from the original
centers, promoting urban agriculture in other sections of Bogotá.

Leon
is one of 12 technicians who make the rounds assessing the progress of
the "urban farms" and discussing problems with the cultivators. At the
PAVCO Foundation, whose grounds serve as a nucleus, he points out the
old plastic soda bottles used to funnel water and the wooden fruit
crates and black plastic garbage bags where vegetables grow - the
pragmatic use of what would have been trash. He greets three elderly
women who take care of the garden and explains that here people learn
basic urban agriculture and are encouraged to start gardens near their
homes. The women discuss the challenges of growing vegetables in their
households. One has had trouble with animals, and another motions with
her hand towards her open mouth and chuckles. "The grandchildren eat,
but they don't cultivate."

In its first 10 months, the program
has enabled almost 3,000 families to produce food. One successful
"demonstrative unit" is in one of the most dangerous barrios,
Altos de Casuca, a neighborhood of small houses and shacks that has
grown into the hills above Bogotá. The murder rate in Ciudád Bolivar is
high, and the district has historically had an armed presence of both
leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries. According to Germán
Bueno, the project's general coordination consultant, the government
has resettled "demobilized" paramilitaries from other regions in Ciudád
Bolivar, creating an even more volatile condition. Bueno recalls two
weeks in December 2005 when the technicians could not visit the project
sites because several rival paramilitary groups were conducting a turf
war.

Some
of the urban gardeners' challenges are environmental. The few available
water sources, like the Tunjuelito River and a number of streams, are
contaminated with sewage and garbage. Erosion is also a problem, and
much of the topsoil in the area has been stripped away by corporations
mining dirt, gravel, and rock for construction in downtown Bogotá.
Cecilia, who oversees the project site in Altos de Casuca, says this is
why they have to rely on compost. She gestures towards a group of
abandoned houses down the hillside, where an area of the ward is being
evacuated. The houses and earth have been slipping down into the
valley; much of Altos de Casuca was built on a defunct coal mine. But
her gaze quickly returns to a plot of healthy vegetables. Thirty-six
people tend this garden, and they are approaching their third harvest.

Growing their own food and medicinal plants has given residents new hope.

"Planting is a distraction," says Ana Franco. "You start to work and forget the problems."

The
collective gardens have tightened the bonds between neighbors as they
exchange produce and ideas, strategizing how to supply local communal
kitchens with vegetables, or to market their products commercially.

Experience
and knowledge is being shared with the public through magazines, radio,
and TV shows. Posters and stickers bear the slogan “ Volvamos a Sembrar” (We Are Returning to Sow) in hopes that others in Bogotá begin planting
also, as the enthusiasm created in Ciudád Bolivar spreads throughout
the capital, and then to other urban areas in Colombia.

As people
return to sowing seeds in their urban gardens, they cultivate community
and social transformation; the green color of life that Ayala talks
about can grow across a map of the world, to other cities troubled by
division, violence and war such as Belfast and Beirut, and someday,
Baghdad.